Chapter 22. Perl Scripting and SQL Connectivity

The Macintosh community has had access to scripting languages such as Perl for many years. Unfortunately, however, the Macintosh port of Perl, like many other applications, lags behind its Unix and Windows counterparts and lacks many of the features available on other platforms. Mac OS X's underlying Unix base finally brings parity to the platform by giving users access to the latest version of Perl along with the myriad of accompanying add-ons.

Additionally, Macintosh users now enjoy first-class open source database packages such as MySQL. Instead of forking over several hundred (or thousand) dollars for a server-class database system, users can take 20 minutes, compile MySQL, and have a full- featured relational database system. We've never had it so good.

This chapter covers both Perl and MySQL and how they can be combined to create a powerful database development environment. At first glance, this might seem an unlikely pairing, but they both serve as excellent examples of the power Unix gives to the new Mac OS X, and how these technologies can be integrated.